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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

You don’t often hear about planes crashing in mid-air. The systems
they have in place have done a fairly good job at keeping passengers
safe. But safety and security are two different things, and while the
systems may work, one researcher has found they are scarily easy to
hack.

“This is like shooting fish in a barrel. If you’re not scared about
this, you should be,” said researcher Nick Foster at the Def Con
conference in Las Vegas. “Without encryption without any bottom security
and protocol, it’s just not hard.”

The systems that keep planes from running into each other are called
Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast and there are two types ADS-B
In (the transmissions sending information to the planes) and ADS-B out
(the transmissions sending information to the tower). Both of these
transmission types are unencrypted and unauthenticated — meaning the
transmissions between the plane and tower are not protected and there’s
no way to prove it actually came from the plane or the tower. Anyone can
listen to these transmissions and monitor where planes are going and
how fast.

Renderman, or Brad Haines, discovered this blatant vulnerability
after checking out Planefinder AR, an app that lets you hold your phone
to the sky and see where the flights overhead are going. He wondered
where the app got its data, and found a number of websites that
aggregated data from users. These users set up ground stations, collect
data from flights going over, and feed the data into the site’s
database.

So, what can people do with that information? Hack it, of course.

If you have access to the transmissions being sent to the tower, who
is to say you can’t fuzz the information, add a bit of your own data to
the real data. For example, you could tell air traffic control that
there was a plane headed straight for the tower, though no plane
existed. You could also potentially jam the system by adding fifty more
planes to the control tower’s systems, which could send the operators
scrambling or overload the system. You could also duplicate a real
flight headed through the area. This is dangerous if the tower operators
decide to ignore the right flight data, thinking it was a glitch in the
system.

Pilots in flight can be messed with as well. A hacker could alert
pilots to a fake plane headed straight for it. They could also spoof the
GPS, which pilots depend on to know where they are in the skies. We saw
GPS spoofing recently when Iran landed a U.S. drone flying in the
vicinity. The country’s engineers were allegedly able to hack into the
drone’s systems, make it think it was in its landing location and landed
the drone within its borders.

Haines stressed, “for the love of Spongebob do not try anything
you’re about to see.” He wanted to make this public so that the airline
industry can patch up its leaky ship — encrypt and protect this
information.